CO-FOUNDER’S ESSAY SELECTED FOR BEST CANADIAN ESSAYS 2014

Cinema Politica is proud to announce that an essay by Ezra Winton, our network’s Co-founder and Director of Programming, was recently selected and included in The Best Canadian Essays 2014 Anthology.

The essay Upping the Anti- Documentary, capitalism, and liberal consensus in an age of austerity, first published in POV Magazine in December 2013, employs a metaphor contrasting starfish (radical political documentaries) and jellyfish (liberal consensus documentaries). The first are being marginalized by mainstream currents, while the latter are flourishing. As such, “small act” campaigns and notions of “doing good” incrementally of the jellyfish variety are crowding out the starfish that actually aim to activate audiences to intervene in dominant social orders. Winton suggests that to combat liberalism’s troika of comfort, immunity, and consensus, we need alternative media to reach a larger audience. To do so, radical political documentaries need to be supported and distributed through the creation of sustainable platforms. The essay concludes with a selection of Winton’s favourite starfish and jellyfish take-action docs.

Cinema Politica is the largest campus and community based documentary screening network in the world. We are a Montreal-based non-profit media arts organization dedicated to the dissemination of independent political works by Canadian and international filmmakers.